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Was blackmail plot behind the spy poisoning?
Last updated at 08:22am on 04.12.06
Poisoned: Alexander Litvinenko
Alexander Litvinenko planned to make tens of thousands of pounds by blackmailing senior Russian spies and agents, it was alleged yesterday.
The poisoned KGB defector claimed to have access to intelligence documents on people and companies that had fallen foul of the Kremlin - and would use them to extort cash.
The audacious plot was revealed by London-based Russian academic Julia Svetlichnaja, who held a series of interviews with Litvinenko earlier this year for a book she was writing.
Had the former Russian secret agent pursued the plan, it would have made him the target of 'some lethal people', Britain's former spy chief said yesterday.
Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, the former chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee and ex-political director of the Foreign Office, said all evidence for his poisoning led to the Russian state.
Miss Svetlichnaja, a 33-year-old politics student at the University of Westminster, said Mr Litvinenko bombarded her with more than 100 emails and handed her a series of pictures of himself, including one taken to celebrate him getting his British passport. In it, Litvinenko stands menacingly in front of a Union flag while wielding a Chechen sword and wearing KGB gauntlets and a Scottish bonnet.
Miss Svetlichnaja said: 'He told me he was going to blackmail or sell sensitive information about all kinds of powerful people, including oligarchs, corrupt officials and sources in the Kremlin.
'He mentioned a figure of £10,000 that they would pay each time to stop him broadcasting these FSB documents. Litvinenko was short of money and was adamant that he could obtain any files he wanted.'
Miss Svetlichnaja's claims will be scrutinised by Scotland Yard officers, who are yet to establish a clear motive for Mr Litvinenko's poisoning with the radioactive toxin polonium 210.
Miss Svetlichnaja said the 43-year-old dissident had documents from the FSB, the Russian agency formerly known as the KGB, and that he asked her to enter into a business deal with him and 'make money'.
Blackmail plans
In an interview with The Observer, Miss Svetlichnaja said: 'He told me shamelessly of his blackmailing plans aimed at Russian oligarchs. "They have got enough, why not to share? I will do it officially.".'
It also emerged that Mr Litvinenko, a fierce critic of president Putin, had a dossier containing information on the break-up of the oil giant Yukos, which was said to have contained damaging details about the Kremlin's relationship with the firm.
In response to the developments, former spy chief Dame Pauline said that it was increasingly unclear 'whether we're living in England or [spy novelist John] Le Carre land'.
'The question you have to ask yourself, I suppose, is: who has the motive and who has the capability?' she told BBC's Sunday AM programme. 'There's quite a lot of people potentially, I think, who have the motive.
'The capability, I think, ties it much more to some organ of the Russian state. You can't buy polonium in the chemist's, so it has to come from some source that's able to produce it.'
Yuri Shvets, a friend of Mr Litvinenko, claimed last night to have given police the name of the killer.
The former KGB officer was questioned by Scotland Yard officers and an FBI agent in Washington last week.
'The truth is, we have an act of international terrorism on our hands. I happen to believe I know who is behind the death of my friend Sasha (Litvinenko) and the reason for his murder,' he said.
However, he declined to reveal the name he had given to police.
Scotland Yard detectives are due in Moscow today to interview three Russians who met Mr Litvinenko at the Millennium Hotel in London's West End on November 1 - the day he claimed to have been poisoned.
With the murder set to be raised with European interior ministers in Brussels today, Home Secretary John Reid said that the investigation was likely to 'widen out' beyond Britain.
'The police will follow wherever this investigation leads inside or outside of Britain,' he told Sky News.
Meanwhile, doctors treating the Italian academic Mario Scaramella, who tested positive for polonium 210, said yesterday he remained 'well' and had no poisoning symptoms.
